Flunking Arne Duncan
Diane Ravitch
US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, “What’s there to hide?” Given Duncan’s enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education.
Here are his grades:
Does Duncan respect the limited role of the federal government in education, which all previous secretaries have recognized?
No. Duncan has expanded the role of the federal government in unprecedented ways. He seems not to know that education is the responsibility of state and local
